Guides
Hand-written guides on reading SEO data, fixing what the checker finds, and getting seen by search engines and AI assistants.
Allow or block AI crawlers in robots.txt
AI crawlers fall into two groups: bots that fetch pages for answers and bots that collect training data. Here is how to allow one and block the other without b…
5 min readllms.txt: what it is and whether you need it
llms.txt is a short, voluntary Markdown file that summarises a site for language models. No major search engine uses it, it replaces nothing, and it takes fift…
4 min readWhat crawlers see on a JavaScript-rendered site
If your content is built in the browser, crawlers that do not run JavaScript see an empty page. Here is how to test it in two minutes and which fix fits your s…
5 min readHow to measure whether AI assistants recommend your brand
Ask brand-free questions the way customers do, sample several of them, record mention, sentence and position, and compare runs over time — one model is one sam…
4 min readStructured data and Open Graph tags: the minimum every site needs
Organization and WebSite JSON-LD on the homepage, page types only when they are true, and four Open Graph tags with a 1200×630 image that loads for anyone.
4 min readHow to read the Search Console Performance report
What each Performance metric counts, why the query table and the chart disagree, and the diagnosis patterns that explain most traffic changes.
6 min readAverage position: why it misleads and how to track rankings properly
Average position is an impression-weighted average of many different searches. Read per query, with impressions and segments, it becomes useful; read site-wide…
5 min readCanonical tags: how to set them and the mistakes that cost rankings
One correct line in the head consolidates duplicate URLs; one wrong line can deindex a whole section. The rules, the classic mistakes, and how to check.
5 min readHTTPS, www and redirect chains: getting one clean URL
Four versions of every domain exist by default. How to collapse them into one HTTPS URL with single-hop 301s, a complete certificate chain and HSTS, and how to…
4 min readXML sitemaps that actually help: format, size limits and common errors
A sitemap only helps when it lists canonical 200 URLs, parses as valid XML and stays within the limits. The format, the rules and the errors that break it.
5 min readTitle tags and meta descriptions that get clicked
Length limits are pixel-based and approximate; what earns the click is a specific topic up front, one honest differentiator and a description that promises som…
5 min readnoindex, robots.txt and the mistakes that hide a whole site
robots.txt decides what bots may fetch; noindex decides what may appear in results. Mixing them up, or shipping a staging setting, is how healthy sites disappe…
5 min readServer response time (TTFB): what is slow and how to fix it
TTFB mostly measures how long your server takes to build a page. Split it into network and server time with curl, then fix caching, queries and distance in tha…
5 min readYour SEO score dropped: a 15-minute triage checklist
Look at which criteria moved, deal with critical issues before anything else, tie the drop to a specific change, and confirm before acting — some drops are jus…
5 min readEvery issue the SEO checker reports links to the guide that explains it. Full list of issue codes: How scoring works.